August 6 is the Feast of the Transfiguration in the Christian liturgical year, in which we remember when Jesus shone with a light too bright to look at. In 1945, the United States celebrated this day by showing the world its own power to bring down fire from heaven, a light too bright to look at.
On the 9th, this celebration of US military power continued at Nagasaki, the drop point being St. Mary's Cathedral in the most Christian city in Japan.
Of course any number of lying rationalizations are offered for this deed, notably that hundreds of thousands of Americans would have died taking the home islands. US military leaders knew better, such as Dwight Eisenhower, who was still saying in 1963 that there was no need to hit them "with that awful thing." In fact, Douglas MacArthur had already shown that it was possible to conquer the Japanese forces with rather low casualties, having suffered fewer casualties in his entire Pacific campaign than the D-Day invasion. Okinawa resulted in high American casualties only because the commanders didn't want to do it MacArthur's way - having captured the air bases and the north at the cost of about 2,000 killed and wounded in the first few days, which was all the really needed strategically. Over the next two months, they suffered over 60,000 more casualties breaking through the Naha-Shuri line of fortifications, knowing that they could have just left the Japanese forces to twist in the wind, as MacArthur had done with new Britain and New Guinea, at no cost. By this time the Japanese Navy was all gone, and Japan - with no petroleum or even coal to run its military - was completely blockaded. You couldn't run a military in 1945 without petroleum. They were done, and ready to surrender if only they could keep the
emperor, and the Americans wound up giving them that anyway.
In fact, in these crimes we see in the American people what would have happened to the German people, and how they would have justified their nation's crimes, if they had won the war. The American architects of this criminal conduct knew this well. As Curtis LeMay said, he and his companions would have faced war crimes tribunals They would have danced at the end of a rope for sure.
To understand the significance for American Christians, consider just this: what would be the spiritual state of German Christians today if Germany had won the war and the German Christians were signed up with the winning Nazi narrative concerning what they had done in the war and how justified it was?
I don't think we need to look further to see why nothing of lasting spiritual importance has happened in American Christianity since 1945. There have been spiritual movements, notably the Jesus people revival of 1968 to 1972 and the charismatic movement. But they have all cast their fruit, like an accursed fruit tree.
It seems to me that Christians, who ought to know better, can't get it through their heads that just as God sees in secret, he also hears in secret. God makes a point of hearing the cry of innocent blood that people refuse to hear. Like the blood of Abel, the cry of the American empire's victims, which its Christians turn their ears away from, reaches the ears of God, so that he doesn't hear us who refuse to hear (Proverbs 21:13). If David had to get things straight concerning Saul's attempt to destroy the Gibeonites (2 Samuel 21), where do American Christians get the idea that we can blip over far greater crimes?
Well, that's all I have to offer in the way of the theology of the obvious today. What follows is
Anthony Gregory writing in the Libertarian Standard, included below in full, because I don't think it can be improved upon. And don't miss the interview with Robert McNamara here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cdmfPThGZ-s
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the U.S. Terror State
Being a U.S. war criminal means never having to say sorry. Paul
Tibbets, the man who flew the Enola Gay and destroyed Hiroshima, lived
to the impressive age of 92 without publicly expressing guilt for what
he had done. He had even reenacted his infamous mission at a 1976 Texas
air show, complete with a mushroom cloud, and later said he never meant
this to be offensive. In contrast, he called it a “damn big insult” when
the Smithsonian planned an exhibit in 1995 showing some of the damage
the bombing caused.
We might understand a man not coming to terms with his most important
contribution to human history being such a destructive act. But what
about the rest of the country?
It’s sickening that Americans even debate the atomic bombings, as
they do every year in early August. Polls in recent years reveal
overwhelming majorities of the American public accepting the acts as
necessary.
Conservatives are much worse on this topic, although liberals surely
don’t give it the weight it deserves. Trent Lott was taken to the
woodshed for his comments in late 2002 about how Strom Thurmond would
have been a better president than Truman. Lott and Thurmond both
represent ugly strains in American politics, but no one dared question
the assumption that Thurmond was obviously a less defensible candidate
than Truman. Zora Neale Hurston, heroic author of the Harlem
Renaissance, might have had a different take, as she astutely called
Truman “a monster” and “the butcher of Asia.” Governmental segregation
is terrible, but why is murdering hundreds of thousands of foreign
civilians with as much thought as one would give to eradicating
silverfish treated as simply a controversial policy decision in
comparison?
Perhaps it is the appeal to necessity. We hear that the United States
would have otherwise had to invade the Japanese mainland and so the
bombings saved American lives. But saving U.S. soldiers wouldn’t justify
killing Japanese children any more than saving Taliban soldiers would
justify dropping bombs on American children. Targeting civilians to
manipulate their government is the very definition of terrorism.
Everyone was properly horrified by Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 murder
spree in Norway – killing innocents to alter diplomacy. Truman murdered a
thousand times as many innocents on August 6, 1945, then again on
August 9.
It doesn’t matter if Japan “started it,” either. Only individuals
have rights, not nations. Unless you can prove that every single
Japanese snuffed out at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was involved in the Pearl
Harbor attack, the murderousness of the bombings is indisputable. Even
the official history should doom Truman to a status of permanent
condemnation. Besides being atrocious in themselves, the U.S. creation
and deployment of the first nuclear weapons ushered in the seemingly
endless era of global fear over nuclear war.
However, as it so happens, the conventional wisdom is an oversimplification at best.
The U.S. provoked the Japanese to fire the first shot,
as more and more historians have acknowledged. Although the attack on
Pearl Harbor, a military base, was wrong, it was far less indefensible
than the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s civilian populations.
As for the utilitarian calculus of “saving American lives,” historian
Ralph Raico explains:
[T]he rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest
on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency:
that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more
American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been
lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out
invasion of Honshu the next year, if that was needed. But the worst-case
scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was
forty-six thousand American lives lost.
The propaganda that the atomic bombings saved lives was nothing but a
public relations pitch contrived in retrospect. These were just
gratuitous acts of mass terrorism. By August 1945, the Japanese were
completely defeated, blockaded, starving. They were desperate to
surrender. All they wanted was to keep their emperor, which was
ultimately allowed anyway. The U.S. was insisting upon unconditional
surrender, a purely despotic demand. Given what the Allies had done to
the Central Powers, especially Germany, after the conditional surrender
of World War I, it’s understandable that the Japanese resisted the
totalitarian demand for unconditional surrender.
A 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey determined the Hiroshima and
Nagasaki nukings were not decisive in ending the war. Most of the
political and military brass
agreed.
“The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit
them with that awful thing,” said Dwight Eisenhower in a 1963 interview
with
Newsweek.
Another excuse we hear is the specter of Hitler getting the bomb
first. This is a non sequitur. By the time the U.S. dropped the bombs,
Germany was defeated and its nuclear program was revealed to be nothing
in comparison to America’s. The U.S. had 180,000 people working for
several years on the Manhattan Project. The Germans had a small group
led by a few elite scientists,
most of whom were
flabbergasted on August 6, as they had doubted such bombs were even
possible. Even if the Nazis had gotten the bomb – which they were very
far from getting – it wouldn’t in any way justify killing innocent
Japanese.
For more evidence suggesting that the Truman administration was out
to draw Japanese blood for its own sake, or as a show of force for
reasons of
Realpolitik, consider the United States’s
one-thousand-plane bombing of Tokyo on August 14, the largest bombing raid of the Pacific war,
after Hirohito
agreed to surrender and the Japanese state made it clear it wanted
peace. The bombing of Nagasaki should be enough to know it was not all
about genuinely stopping the war as painlessly as possible – why not
wait more than three days for the surrender to come? But to
strategically bomb Japan five days after the destruction of Nagasaki, as
Japan was in the process of waving the white flag? It’s hard to imagine
a greater atrocity, or clearer evidence that the U.S. government was
not out to secure peace, but instead to slaughter as many Japanese as it
could before consolidating its power for the next global conflict.
The U.S. had, by the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroyed 67
Japanese cities by firebombing, in addition to helping the British
destroy over a hundred cities in Germany. In this dramatic footage from
The Fog of War,
Robert McNamara describes
the horror he helped unleash alongside General Curtis LeMay, with
images of the destroyed Japanese cities and an indication of what it
would have meant for comparably sized cities in the United States:
“Killing fifty to ninety percent of the people in 67 Japanese cities
and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional – in
the minds of some people – to the objectives we were trying to achieve,”
McNamara casually says. Indeed, this was clearly murderous, and
Americans are probably the most resistant of all peoples to the truths
of their government’s historical atrocities. It doesn’t hurt that the
U.S. government
has suppressed for years evidence such as
film footage
shot after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet even based on what has long been
uncontroversial historical fact, we should all be disgusted and
horrified by what the U.S. government did.
How would it have been if all those Germans and Japanese, instead of
being burned to death from the sky, were corralled into camps and shot
or gassed? Materially, it would have been the same. But Americans refuse
to think of bombings as even in the same ballpark as other
technologically expedient ways of exterminating people by the tens and
hundreds of thousands. Why? Because the U.S. government has essentially
monopolized terror bombing for nearly a century. No one wants to
confront the reality of America’s crimes against humanity.
It would be one thing if Americans were in wide agreement that their
government, like that of the Axis governments of World War II, had acted
in a completely indefensible manner. But they’re not. The Allies were
the white hats. Ignore the fact that the biggest belligerent on
America’s side was Stalin’s Russia, whom the FDR and Truman
administrations helped round up a million or two refugees in the
notorious undertaking known as
Operation Keelhaul.
We’re not supposed to think about that. World War II began with Pearl
Harbor and it ended with D-Day and American sailors returning home to
kiss their sweethearts who had kept America strong by working on
assembly lines.
In the Korean war, another Truman project, the U.S. policy of
shameful mass murder continued. According to historian Bruce Cumings,
professor at the University of Chicago, millions of North Korean
civilians were slaughtered by U.S. fire-bombings, chemical weapons and
newly developed ordnance, some of which weighed in at 12,000 pounds.
Eighteen out of 22 major cities were at least half destroyed. For a
period in 1950, the US dropped about 800 tons of bombs on North Korea
every day. Developed at the end of World War II, napalm got its real
start in Korea. The US government also targeted civilian dams, causing
massive flooding.
In Indochina, the U.S. slaughtered millions in a similar fashion.
Millions of tons
of explosives were dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. These
ghastly weapons are literally still killing people – tens of thousands
have died since the war ended,
and three farmers were killed not long ago.
Among the horrible effects of the bombing was the rise of Pol Pot’s
regime, probably the worst in history on a per capita basis.
The U.S. has committed mass terrorism since, although not on quite
the scale as in past generations. Back in the day the U.S. would drop
tons of explosives, knowing that thousands would die in an instant. In
today’s wars, it drops explosives and then pretends it didn’t mean to
kill the many civilians who predictably die in such acts of violence.
Only fifteen hundred bombs were used to attack Baghdad in March 2003.
That’s what passes as progress. The naked murderousness of U.S. foreign
policy, however, is still apparent. The bombings of water treatment
facilities and sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s deliberately targeted the
vulnerable Iraqi people. Once the type of atrocities the U.S. committed
in World War II have been accepted as at the worst debatable tactics in
diplomacy, anything goes.
American politicians would have us worry about Iran, a nation that
hasn’t attacked another country in centuries, one day getting the bomb.
There is
no evidence
that the Iranians are even seeking nuclear weapons. But even if they
were, the U.S. has a much worse record in both warmongering and nuclear
terror than Iran or any other country in modern times. It is more than
hypocritical for the U.S. to pose as the leader of global peace and
nuclear disarmament.
The hypocrisy and moral degeneracy in the mouths of America’s
celebrated leaders should frighten us more than anything coming out of
Iran or North Korea, especially given America’s capacity to kill and
willingness to do it. Upon dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima,
President Truman called the bomb the “greatest achievement of organized
science in history” and wondered aloud how “atomic power can become a
powerful and forceful influence toward the maintenance of world peace.”
Nothing inverts good and evil, progress and regress, as much as the
imperial state. In describing the perversion of morality in the history
of U.S. wars, Orwell’s “war is peace” doesn’t cut it. “Exterminating
civilians by the millions is the highest of all virtues” is perhaps a
better tagline for the U.S. terror state.
